Sony KDL-26EX302 review

A compact TV designed for your bedroom or den, sporting four HDMI connections so you can hook up to multiple devices

by
Cliff Joseph| 16 May 11

Rating

Price

RRP:

Best prices today

Retailer

Price

Delivery

Price comparison from , and manufacturers

Sony KDL-26EX302 review

Sony charges about £400 for the KDL-26EX302 on its website, but we’ve seen it on sites such as Amazon for just under the £300 mark. The KDL-26EX302 is a television rather than a computer monitor, but is one of Sony’s ‘small and stylish’ range, designed for use in the bedroom, and it could make a good companion for a laptop computer or iPad.

It might not have the slimline profile found in some of its rivals, but it provides no less than four HDMI interfaces, which makes it a good choice if you want to hook it up to multiple devices as part of your home entertainment system. Other interfaces found at the back of the screen include two SCART connectors, and both Composite and Component video inputs, that could be used to hook up a camcorder to watch home video footage.

We were a little surprised to see that a 26in screen such as this had a resolution of 1,366 x 768, rather than full HD resolution of 1920 x 1080, but the image quality was fine when watching our HD episodes of Glee, and some other HD programmes on iPlayer. It has a Freeview TV tuner built in as well, along with a respectable set of internal speakers, so you can listen to music or play games quite easily, and without any further expense.

There’s a somewhat daunting remote control festooned with buttons, and a horrifically dense PDF manual that guides you through the main features, so it might take a little while to figure out all the controls. However, there are useful presets for tasks such as watching movies and sports, or using computer graphics, so you don’t need to be a technical expert to quickly switch modes when using different types of device.

A compact TV designed for your bedroom or den, sporting four HDMI connections so you can hook up to multiple devices

OUR VERDICT

Our only real complaint – apart from the modest resolution – was that the text display could be a bit sharper when connected to a computer. This means that the KDL-26EX302, as you’d expect, is really better suited to watching TV and video or playing games than more serious tasks such as word processing or spreadsheet work.